David Jenyns walks through how Portavac, a cleaning company, systemized operations by appointing Kane as systems champion to document procedures with GoPro footage and screen recordings. They focused on critical workflows first, then created a 15-point truck-return checklist that eliminated recurring failures like dirty or underfilled trucks, shifting the owner from blaming staff to building systems.
Now we want to answer the most commonly asked question, where do I start? Out of the infinite number of things we could be documenting, what are the handful of ones that are going to have the biggest impact? And that's what we'll focus in on this particular session. Yeah, I think a great way to start, I think is just to kind of give you high level how this starts to come together and give you some context. So the guy you're seeing on the screen at the moment, his name's Dave Porter and he owns a company called Portavac down in Victoria. And he tried to systemize his business a couple of times before, didn't quite get the traction that he wanted and then ended up coming across Systemology. They're like a gutter cleaning company, so they do commercial and residential. And the business for him, it's been actually growing really quite good over a good number of years. He's quite busy, as all business owners are, and he's got a leadership team. And when he read Systemology, one of the things that stood out to him was I don't have to be the guy who is driving this because previously when he tried to do it, he was the one who was trying to sit down and get the systems just right. So I identified the. The systems champion just so happened to be a guy called Kane who worked in the office that was his systems champion. And he got Cain to go through Systemology, do some of the training, get his head around it. And they just went through the process that you're about to go through. They started off, they identified the critical client flow. That's what we're going to do now. And realized that he didn't need hundreds of systems. Kane then worked on building what we call the systems assigned sheet. This is just what is the plan? What is it that we're actually going to capture in these systems? He realized it was a two person job. Now Kane worked in the office. He wasn't on the tools. He didn't go out cleaning the roof gutters or anything like that. He was just like an apprentice who didn't quite want to get onto the tools. So they put him into the office. He was just getting started. He was a little bit curious about how the business worked and what it is that they did and wanted to be involved maybe a bit more on a business level. He got trained up and realized, hey, I can be the second person. I don't have to be the knowledgeable person. I just need to know how to ask good questions and how I can record Things getting done and started making a bunch of videos. They even put a GoPro on him and he went out in the field with one of their leads guys and filmed for the whole day saying hello to clients, setting up the equipment on the truck, packing down safety checks, all that sort of stuff. And he just recorded it on his GoPro for the day. So there's a range of different videos. Some, it was issuing out a job, they had some jobs management system where it'd go through to the different tradespeople and they'd know where they had to rock up and at what time. And he did that through zoom and loom to record those videos. And then he did GoPro when he was in the field. And those videos he ended up then working through, getting them documented. So he'd watch them and pull out the key steps and just really tried to keep it simple, worked his way through, then ended up building out one of those plans I showed you a little bit earlier. The spreadsheet started to expand beyond the critical client flow, thinking all of the different systems in the different departments, and then basically slowly chipped his way through it. Now Dave said for him the biggest win that he got was it was actually when it changed his mindset. So Dave Porter, the owner, had said, you know, he used to get really frustrated when the trucks would come back because they were, you know, not filled up, they were dirty. They, he had a little checklist clipboard that was meant to have, you know, some printout so things could be written on it. It was always empty. And he just, it kept on being this repeated issue for him. And he, you know, his normal default response would be basically to yell at the person who ever returned the truck and said, come on, next time get it right. What's wrong with you? And then he realized this change happened in his brain. And, and after he went through this process, he thought, we just need a system for this. We just need a checklist that when someone returns the truck, they run through a 15 point checklist and they can't hand the keys over until they've run through the checklist. And for him that was when he thought, I've got this now. And he had his big breakthrough which was, let's not think about it in terms of who did the wrong thing and I need to wrap them over the knuckles, but rather how do I fix this at a systems level? Because half his team didn't even know that, that they needed to run through 15 point checklist. Like it was in Dave's head on what they should be doing. But no one else had visibility on that. All new people were starting, and then they didn't know any better. They just thought someone else did it. So he got that aha moment, went to work on the system, and then that really was a big moment for him to say, ah, this is how we do things here now.
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